Hatchet 2

I really liked the first Hatchet. I feel that bears repeating. So I was excited when I heard that they had made a sequel. I know horror movie sequels can often be a pissweak endeavour, but I figured that something that offered dumb, gory fun like the original Hatchet could spawn something even better if they went bigger and more ridiculous with it. It also helped that it was being made by the same director, Adam Green. It all sounded like it was going to be a massive fun time, but unfortunately Hatchet 2 is a massive disappointment.

I don’t like Hatchet 2 and the reason is simple - Hatchet 2 just isn’t fun overall. The silliness and knowing humour of the first movie are both pretty much completely gone as the sequel tries to outdo it in terms of gore and nastiness, and tries to go serious with it. There’s still some occasional humour and some characters are thrown in as comic relief, but it feels out of place with the more serious tone the movie seems to be going for. The gore and kills are pretty awesome, but it’s a nastier, uglier movie than the first, lacking the humorous charm of the original. It almost feels as though it was made by an entirely different person. The shots are closer, there’s more shakycam and it’s pretty uninspired in terms of mood and lighting, at least compared to the original’s often hokey charms. As to why this happened, I feel it’d be due to director Adam Green having a substantial change in priorities and preferences in the years since the original, stretching out even to his filmmaking style. Hatchet 2 has a more claustrophobic feel, with a lot of close ups and most locations feeling small or narrow.

The first and most noticeable change is that they replaced Marybeth’s actress with Danielle Harris, a D-class horror film actress who, despite appearing in a lot of horror movies over the last few decades, really sucks at the whole ‘acting’ thing. She’s a total bore here. More than that, she’s a funpire – she actively sucks the fun out of the movie with every scene she’s in. Being bitchy and generically ‘tough’ (swearing a lot and threatening everybody does not make for good characterisation, dialing the redneck aspect of the character up to a ridiculous degree) she plays the film ‘seriously’, and a noticeable change to the Marybeth from the original film. She also has one eyebrow raised through the entire film, making her look constantly surprised (that’s largely just Harris’ look in general though). Marybeth is too serious and brooding and whiny here and it really hurts the movie, especially since she’s the focus of it. She’s also become far less capable, spending her time being mostly useless and just screaming when shit gets real. I know it’s weird to put so much focus so early in this review on a single issue as simple as a recasting, but honestly it’s one of the film’s biggest issues for me. She’s just so awful that she sours the entire movie.

Taking place immediately at the end of the original Hatchet, Marybeth (Danielle Harris) narrowly escapes from Victor Crowley’s clutches, makes it out of the swamp and heads back to town. She immediately seeks out Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd), to learn more about Victor and how to stop him, and together they form a posse of hunters to go back into the swamp to try and kill Crowley for good. Marybeth is hoping to retrieve the bodies of her father and brother to give them a proper burial, and her uncle comes along to make sure she’s ok. But Reverend Zombie has his own plans – he believes that Victor Crowley’s spirit can only be sated if he gets revenge by killing those responsible for his death and he’s lured them into the hunting party for that purpose.

So basically it’s an excuse to have another bunch of characters head into the swamp to get killed off one by one, something that feels especially hollow considering the original’s charm. The overall far more serious tone is what hurts it the most I feel, since the scenes when people aren’t getting hacked up by Crowley are so long and interminably dull. Seeing Marybeth argue with her uncle about going into the swamp for five minutes is so dull I just feel like fast forwarding through it. It’s not even a long movie, coming in at about seventy or so minutes, but boy hell does it feel long and drawn out in those first forty minutes.

Speaking of which, the first forty minutes of the movie, barring some small callback cameos to the original and a pretty fun/gross pre-title kill, are a total freaking borefest made up of characters spouting exposition and Marybeth complaining. And this is the biggest problem with the movie: Marybeth is not an interesting or likeable character. She wasn’t interesting in the first film, and she isn’t here so focusing on her was a big mistake. In the first one her character’s lack of character wasn’t too much of an issue because she wasn’t the focus and everybody else was a ridiculous caricature. She wasn’t the lynchpin holding the movie together despite her final girl status, so she never brought it down. In this one however she’s the focus of attention and just constantly brings everything down with how endlessly serious she is. They want her struggle and issues to carry weight, and they really, really don’t, so she just comes across as annoying and whiny. She’s also an idiot to boot this time around. In the first film her trepidation made sense – she was wary of the legend of Crowley, but wanted to find her missing family so she braved it anyway, not entirely aware of what she was facing. This time she knows exactly what the danger is, and yet she comes across as dumber, more naive and less capable than she was before. And holy hell is she whiny. I feel the need to bring this up yet again, since she spends so much of the film endlessly complaining.

Once they get to the swamp and things actually start happening it improves, but it also devolves a bit and becomes a loose collection of gory kills. The hunting party instantly splits up for no reason as the various side characters go about their own little agendas. That at least is a nice little excuse for why they’d otherwise pointlessly split up (two guys want to hunt alligators for cash, which calls back to the gator hunting mentioned in the first film), and the Reverend’s ulterior motives explains why he never tries to stop them. Otherwise with everybody split up and getting killed individually it breaks the pace of the movie in a weird way, especially since the characters are all completely unaware of what happened to each other and never get mentioned - they don’t even try to stick together or check on each other, they just wander around aimlessly getting hacked apart.

This is where the film tries to bring in some humour with its side characters, but it’s pretty weird. We get a collection of hillbillies and assorted hunters, none of whom are particularly memorable. There is the one black guy who sings a song I assume to be titled ‘Chicken and Biscuits and Gravy’, since those are the sole words repeated ad infimum. He hits on Marybeth and is a goofball, and that’s his entire character. There are a few hillbillies who just talk about being hillbilliesm and also a really out of place pairing between a hunter and his almost stalker-ish ex-girlfriend who comes with him on the dangerous murder hunt so she can seduce him. They’re a weird mob, but you won’t really care or remember them. Tony Todd is good as Reverend Zombie, though it is weird to see what was a cameo role being expanded into a main character, though a secretly villainous one. His voice is still amazing, the sort of deep, evil voice that you’d expect a Disney villain to have, but the humour is gone now. In a weird little bit of casting, the guy who played hapless tour guide Shaun in the first film comes back to play Shaun’s brother Justin, which is a bit weird. Even he lacks the humour he had in the first film.

We get an updated backstory to Victor Crowley and his curse, which is a bit weird. Attempts at changing horror villain’s backstories and origins have a history of never working out too well in anything really, and there wasn’t anything wrong with his story in the first place. The additions here also don’t really change anything, other than giving an unneeded explanation to something that wasn’t particularly important. Victor’s father, Thomas Crowley, had a sick and ailing wife. He got a live-in nurse to look after her, and ended up falling in love with her and having an affair. His dying wife found out and lay down a voodoo curse on them both before dying. Some nine months later and the nurse gave birth to the disfigured Victor, the sight of which made her die of shock. It’s a pretty benign addition actually, and does very little other than explaining Victor’s appearance and apparent immortality as being due to voodoo.

Reverend Zombie thinks that Victor Crowley will only leave once his vengeful spirit has been appeased by killing off those who had wronged him – the teenagers who had burnt down his shack and indirectly caused his death. In the decades since they’ve grown into men and they’re exactly the same men Zombie invites to join the posse. In another retcon, Marybeth’s dead dad (Freddy Kreuger’s short cameo from the first film) is also one of those grown teens, purposelessly linking Marybeth to Victor. A lot of horror movies tend to do this, since linking characters is an easy way to make a dull, uninteresting character important in some way. In this case it gives an excuse as to why we’re still being subjected to Marybeth, when she could have just as easily been replaced by anybody. Reverend Zombie explicitly says at the beginning that Victor Crowley is a ghost (he calls him a ‘repeater’ as he constantly relives the night he was killed), and as such can’t be killed in conventional methods, but Marybeth sort of ignores him completely to try and shoot him to death, even though that didn’t work in the first film.

Crowley himself has undergone something of an apparent redesign, most noticeable in his face, which is larger and more leathery this time around. He even looks bigger and more hulking this time through. Kane Hodder does another great job in making Crowley exactly the sort of monster man you’d never want to be caught by. So while a lot of the other changes have been disappointing, Victor Crowley as a character is still a lot of fun and really deserved a better sequel. The film’s saving grace is the gory kills, which are brutal, gross, often creative and pretty funny. The opener sets the bar – a hillbilly is strangled with his own intestines until his head pops off – and from there the goriness continues. Faces are caved in with hatchets, heads are torn open by propellers and a massive chainsaw is used to slice through some guys groin-first. There is a lot of blood and gore thrown around, and it’s pretty cool, though some effects do look cheap. Overall though, these are some pretty awesome kills.

The ending here is one I like. It has the exact same sudden abruptness as the first film’s ending, but it’s the reverse situation. It has an air of finality about it, far better than the first film’s sudden stop, and at least ends the movie with a bang. The journey there is sadly mostly a frustrating test of patience, especially through the dull first half, but those kills and that ending at least bring it over the line. Oddly enough, despite how apparently final this ending is, yet another Hatchet sequel was made a few years later.